Growing grim about the mouth? Involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses? You're not alone. As the days turn dark and cold, it's easy to feel a Novembery damp and drizzle start to creep into your soul.
Luckily, as certain famous protagonists well know, you don't have to knock the hats off passers-by to feel alive again: you only need to take to the sea! Or better yet, gather yourself cozily beneath a blanket, pour a warm mug of tea, and bring the sea to you.
With UK Libraries' electronic resources, your globe-spanning literary excursions can come equipped with incredibly granular maps and guides. Look no further than the JSTOR Understanding series, a research tool that connects primary texts with academic articles on a line by line basis.
Users can find, for example, all 57 articles that quote from the opening passage of Herman Melville's Moby Dick – along with every article that quotes anything at all from that behemothy book – and read the entire salty tome for free.
With four collections of works – American Literature, British Literature, Shakespeare, and the King James Bible – the series is an excellent tool for jumping straight from the text into the scholarship, providing a starting point for research that may be more intuitive than traditional keyword-based searches. It can also show areas of scholarly concentration within a text, revealing more-studied and less-studied passages.
Each collection contains full-text versions of classic literary works. Running along the text of each work is a number that represents the number of articles and chapters in JSTOR that quote that specific passage. Users can click on the number to open a window displaying all the articles and chapters and further filter the results by date and content type.
So if you find yourself bemoaning the endlessness, yea, the intolerableness of all earthly effort this November, give this new way of reading – and new way of searching – a try. The coffin around your head may end up as a buoy at last!
